We Angered God
by lowrider1213
Summary: He wondered what fresh hell was waiting for them up ahead, hidden in the dark. Rating for language and mature themes.
1. We Angered God

We Angered God

Emily was pulled out of a deep and blessedly dreamless sleep on their fourth night in Montana, and for the life of her she couldn't figure out why. Without opening her eyes, she took stock of her body – no, she was not hungry, not thirsty, not facing imminent bladder failure. She listened to the air conditioner whirring from the unit by the window, but it was not loud enough to wake her. She cracked open one eye and glanced at the alarm clock on the table beside her.

The glow of the red numbers cast an ominous tint around the room as the digits seemed to mock her.

 _2:19._ Yeah, definitely not time to be in any state of consciousness.

Which begged the question, then, why was she awake?

 _It must have been something outside,_ she thought as she turned to her side to try to go back to sleep. Just as she was being pulled back into unconsciousness, her brain settled on a detail that she had passed over without recognition. She immediately bolted upright in bed and reached for the lamp, nearly knocking it off of the bedside table in her haste. As the light from the single bulb flooded the room, she grabbed her Glock from the bedside table and looked back to the floor.

There.

 _Shit_.

But the bloody footprint on her floor was the least of her problems in that moment, because as she reached for her phone, already calling lucky speed dial number one as she simultaneously scanned the room looking for anything else out of place, she saw it. Later, she would wonder how she hadn't seen it immediately, but there was neither time nor room in her brain for that thought right now. As it was, all she could do was stare in horror as the scream was ripped unwillingly from her throat.


	2. The Dying of the Light

The Dying of the Light

His mind had barely registered her screaming his name before he was out of his room, gun in hand, racing to her door with the other members of his team. Morgan got there first and pulled the now silent Prentiss into the hallway, shoving her towards the waiting Rossi. Hotch spared a moment to look over his agent, and seeing that she appeared to be physically fine, he pushed his way into her hotel room, Morgan and Reid following closely behind him. What he saw, well, he was sure he wasn't going to stop seeing it any time soon.

No wonder she'd screamed.

She had found the body of, who was in all likelihood, their latest victim, although the state of the body made it impossible to tell for sure. And not only had she found it, but she had found it in her room. Nailed to her wall.

As he took in the details – the stitches holding the eyelids open and exposing the empty ocular cavities, the eyes removed from their sockets and placed in the mouth which was frozen open in a silent scream, the tongue and vocal cords torn out and discarded on the blood-soaked floor, the intestines pulled from the open abdomen and knotted around the neck like a hangman's noose – Hotch motioned for Reid to join him.

"Call for CSU, tell them that this is now their first priority. Then call the detectives, have them meet us at the station."

Reid nodded as he walked off, already dialing the numbers.

Morgan took his place.

"She must've still been alive when he brought her here, there's too much blood for her to already have been dead."

Morgan took Hotch's silence for agreement and continued, "That's a bold move, breaking into an FBI agent's room with a live victim. Why take that chance?"

Hotch took that moment to speak, "How did he get in?"

"What?"

"How did he get in here? The window is locked, the door was locked, the vents are too small to crawl through, there's no connecting door. How did he get in?"

Hotch didn't wait for an answer, instead turning and walking back out to where Rossi was softly talking to Prentiss. She looked up at him as he approached, and he held out his room key.

"You can change in my room. We're headed to the station."

She took the key card from his outstretched hand, nodded, and went back into her now former hotel room, presumably to grab her go-bag. As they watched her go, Rossi gravely spoke:

"I have a bad feeling about this one, Aaron."

As his friend returned to his own hotel room to prepare for the long day that was stretching out before them, Hotch couldn't help but feel a coil of anxiety tightening in his own gut.

 _Yeah, I have a bad feeling about this one too.  
_

* * *

He had been watching her for the last five hours, since they had arrived at the police station to add these newest elements to their admittedly lacking profile. He had seen her pack her earlier distress away into those infamous boxes, seen her shields come up and watched her slip back into her mask. She seemed fine, kept insisting that she was, but the knot that was in his stomach from earlier was only growing. He felt a surge of protectiveness flood him as he watched yet another of the deputies come to speak with her, laying his hand on her arm and no doubt asking her about what had happened at the hotel. He pushed it down, attempting to block out the voice in his head that was insisting that _something_ was going to happen, but he couldn't quite shake it. So lost was he in his own internal battle that it took him a moment to realize that the conversation had stopped and everyone was now waiting for him to say something.

He cleared his throat.

"Morgan, take Rossi and go down to the morgue. This one was different from the other five, and we need to know why. Prentiss and I will head out to the last dump site and see if we missed anything. Reid, I want you to call JJ, see if she can get us two new rooms. Then coordinate with Garcia. Go over everything again, all of their contacts, the places they frequented, everything. Nobody goes out alone. We don't know much about him, so be careful. Check in every two hours."

He made eye contact with each of his agents, and they nodded back at him. Morgan and Rossi immediately stood and started toward one of the SUVs. Hotch waited for Emily to meet him at the door before following her outside. As they made their way to the waiting Suburban, Hotch noticed that the air was heavier now than it had been when they had arrived at the station earlier that morning. He glanced up at the sky and saw the dark clouds rolling in – a storm was coming. The knot in his stomach clenched painfully, but once again he pushed it out of his mind. They climbed into the SUV and he drove them off into the dying light.


	3. Devil in the Dark

Devil in the Dark

"It was my turn."

He was startled out of his thoughts by her soft voice breaking the silence that had engulfed the Suburban for the past ten minutes.

"What?"

"To go to the morgue. It was my turn."

"I know."

Hotch chanced a glance at her with that last statement. Her eyebrows were furrowed, a small frown pulled at her lips; she was either confused or annoyed, perhaps both.

"Then why the hell did you send Morgan and Dave?"

God, he thought, isn't that a loaded question.

"I didn't think it would be appropriate to send you to observe the autopsy of the woman whose body you found in your hotel room."

"Appropriate!?"

"Yes."

Stealing another look at her, he could see the blood vessel above her left eye twitching and fury burned in her eyes.

He clenched his jaw. _Here we go._

"You're not, by any chance, questioning my objectivity or my professionalism?"

He cringed. That was a bad, bad tone. That was a Morgan tone. He needed to fix this, now.

"What? No! Prentiss, you found the body nailed to the wall in your hotel room as though she was Jesus on the cross. I thought that, perhaps, it might be better to take you to go see the crime scene to give you some time to process that fact. I also thought, as the one best acquainted with your hotel room, perhaps you might recognize a common detail at the previous scene that the rest of us might miss. Trust me when I say that your professionalism and objectivity never crossed my mind!"

"Ok, Hotch, jeeze. You don't have to get all worked up about it."

He stared at her incredulously and she just blinked back innocently. He forced himself to take a deep breath.

 _Breathe in for four, hold for two, breathe out for four. Repeat._

She started the scanner for the car's radio.

 _God, give me strength._

* * *

If JJ had any qualms about being asked to re-book two hotel rooms for the team from a thousand and some odd miles away in the same hotel that she had already made reservations for them in, she didn't voice them, and Hotch couldn't've been more glad. It had taken them hours to go back through all of the crime scenes, a task made more difficult by the torrential downpour currently flooding half of downtown, and by the time everyone had reconvened in the small conference room and shared their day's findings it was coming up on the small hours of the morning once more. Hotch looked around at his agents and frowned upon seeing the pure exhaustion written blatantly across their faces, a product of a nearly 24 hour day no doubt compounded by the eighteen and twenty hour days they'd been pulling since they had arrived in this God forsaken town. The empty coffee cups and mountain of sugar packets that littered the small conference room table, along with the grumbling he could feel in his own stomach reminded him that none of them had eaten any real food in too many hours to count, and as he caught a whiff of Morgan as he walked passed him to get his seven-no-eighth cup of bad coffee, his decision was made.

They all needed a hot meal, a hot shower, and more than a few hours of uninterrupted sleep.

He stood to catch everyone's attention, and seeing that he had it, spoke.

"We can't do any more tonight. Reid, find us somewhere to eat. I want to be seated with appetizers coming out in fifteen minutes."

Everyone started shuffling around the room, gathering up their notes and re-sorting everything into the proper folders once more, the weariness they were all feeling slowing their movements. As Reid opened his mouth, no doubt to educate them all on some obscure and equally irrelevant topic (two weeks ago in Tennessee they had all learned the history of moonshining in the Blue Ridge Mountains as they were driving to serve a warrant in the suburbs of Nashville), Hotch shot him a half-hearted glare.  
"I mean it, fifteen minutes."

* * *

Forty-five minutes later saw five tired, smelly, but no longer hungry agents sitting in a small run-down diner waiting for the waitress to return with the check so they could take their weary bodies and put them to rest before they collapsed in a heap of filthy limbs. Even Reid was too tired to keep conversation going, as one-sided as that conversation may have been. Actually, speaking of…

"Reid. Reid! REID!"

He blinked sleepily at Hotch.

"Did JJ give you the new room confirmations?"

For as fast as he could process information on any other day at any other time, it took Reid a moment to understand what Hotch was asking.

"Uh, yeah. I think…I think I have it here somewhere." He started searching through his email for the confirmation numbers.

"Here they are."

He forwarded the email to Hotch and, seeing that his task for the moment was done, sat back and closed his eyes.

Hotch looked at the email from JJ and was pleased to see that she had gotten them connecting rooms without him having to specify. Even when she was sick, she took care of them.

"Alright, when we get back to the hotel, Morgan and Prentiss, you're with me. Reid, you're with Rossi."

The only one who looked surprised was Prentiss, but even she was too exhausted to voice any issues she had right now.

When they arrived back at the hotel, Hotch only stopped at the front desk long enough to pick up the new room keys and order a cot. Their merry band of five trudged to their new lodgings, pausing in the hall for each of them to grab their ready bags from their old rooms. Before they took the final steps to cross the threshold into unconsciousness Hotch called them to attention once more.

"The connecting door stays open, understood? And no one goes out alone. Not for anything. We'll start again tomorrow at 7."

Seeing a collection of nods and hearing a few muttered "Yes, Hotch"s, he collected the old key cards and turned to Morgan. He handed him his ready bag and one of their new room keys and started back down the hall to check them out of the old rooms. As he was walking away, he could hear Morgan and Prentiss bickering.

"God damned son of a-"

"Prentiss, it's not rocket science. Just open the damn door!"

"Shut up, Morgan!"

"Princess, please. I'm dying out here!"

"So help me God, Morgan, one more word out of you and I'll shove this worthless piece of plastic so far up your-"

"OK! Ok, Princess. I get the picture!"

"Ah-ha!"

"Nicely done. Can we go in now, your highness?"

"I said shut up, Morgan."

Hotch just rolled his eyes at their antics and kept walking, allowing their banter to fade into the distance. He still had to talk with the front desk before his day was over. Looking at his watch, he sighed. It was going to be another long night.

He just hoped they didn't find another devil in the dark.


	4. Empty Hell

Empty Hell

The knock on the door woke him this time, and he grumbled at having what little sleep he was able to get disturbed for the second night in a row. His eyes flickered to Morgan when he shifted on the cot, but the dark-skinned man didn't wake. It was just as well that he hadn't, Morgan had a short temper first thing in the morning, and Hotch didn't really want to start this day being snapped at by his agent.

Though, judging by the groan he heard coming from the occupant of the bed to the left of his own, he wasn't the only one who had been pulled from their rest.

He twisted the bedside lamp on and the groan grew louder.

A dark head turned to look blearily at him from under a pile of rumpled blankets.

A glare to rival some of his own was shot in his direction, and he remembered that Prentiss didn't take particularly well to being awoken either.

Another knock sounded loudly, seeming to echo around the nearly silent room. He stared at the door as though it would tell him itself who was on the other side.

"I'm guessing that's not room service."

He shook his head and reached for his pistol as she sat up and reached for her own. He shot her a look.

"Stay here."

He stood and padded as quietly as he could over to the door, pausing to look through the peep hole. Seeing no one, he slowly turned the handle and pulled the door open, raising his gun as he did so. Opening the door fully, he mentally cursed at seeing what was on the other side.

There, tied to the door handle with red ribbon was a severed hand clutching a flower.

He noted absently that it was a daisy.

He heard a faint ' _Oh Jesus_ ' from behind him and knew that she had seen too.

He stepped quickly out into the hallway and looked down both sides, but whoever had left it was already gone. He walked back over to the hand and crouched down to get a better look. Blood was dripping from where it was severed, and when he held the back of his own hand up to it, he could feel its warmth.

It was fresh.

"Prentiss, call security. Tell them to lock the place down. We're not losing him again!"

But she was already talking to the head of the hotel's security force, so he turned to the rest of his agents, who had apparently all been roused by his, ah, _enthusiastic_ shouts.

"Get dressed. Our day is starting early."

* * *

He was frustrated. Hell, they were all frustrated, but he was furious.

Someone was targeting one of his agents, and he couldn't find them.

He had the four with him checking and double checking everything that they thought they knew, he'd made Garcia go in early and had her going over everything he could think of. He'd watched the security tapes himself, though the cameras on their floor had been mysteriously not working the night before. The sweep of the hotel had, too, proven fruitless.

They knew nothing more now than they had yesterday.

Even the coroner's examination of the hand had only been able to confirm what he had discovered for himself.

It was indeed fresh.

And likely taken from a living victim.

And they had found that out seven hours ago.

In short, they were running out of things to double check. And to top it all off, they still hadn't had a full 8 hours.

They needed a break – two really. But he couldn't break the case for them, so he settled for the one that he could give them right now and told them that they were leaving for the hotel in ten minutes.

* * *

They ended up getting the break they needed in the case at four in the morning while Reid was keeping watch. His phone rang shrilly and startled them all from their sleep – they were all a little on-edge.

Garcia's voice, slightly distorted through the phone's speaker, eagerly informed them that, after double and triple checking her parameters, she had found something.

And not just something, but a name.

One single person had made purchases in the immediate vicinity of the kidnappings of three of their victims. Purchases that didn't ring any alarm bells unless you knew what they did. A packet of nails – the majority of which were now secured in the wall of Prentiss's previous hotel room. A spool of ribbon, red, like the blood that dripped from the hand it was tied to.

And a dozen white daisies.

Hotch could've kissed her. As it was, she was getting three days of approved vacation and a shiny new laptop.

An hour later, they had three addresses.

Half an hour after that, their warrants came in.

Within minutes of their receipt the five agents and all the deputies the department could spare were heading to their search locations.

He and Dave took seven of the deputies to the home address. Their unsub should be there – he wasn't scheduled to work today and they had no indication that he'd be anywhere else.

Morgan and the other five went to the work address. There might be information on the locations of his victims at his work station – they didn't know if they'd found them all, and he might have some that were still alive.

And he sent Reid and Prentiss to check out the deceased parents' home.

They didn't think he'd be there. He hadn't been close to his parents and there was no indication that anyone had been to the house since their death nearly ten years earlier. But they still needed to check. So he sent them.

God, how he wished he hadn't.

* * *

He was in the middle of tearing apart the kitchen when the call came in. Their unsub – Brigham Newson – hadn't been at home, so they were looking for something to tell them where to find him.

His gut churned with cold dread as he looked at the caller ID on his ringing phone.

It was Reid. Usually when he sent them out together Prentiss called him.

He didn't know why that bothered him so much.

Hotch could count on both hands the number of times he wished he hadn't answered the phone.

This was number eight.

The words had barely left Reid's mouth and he was screaming for Dave, telling him to call Morgan, telling him to get in the car.

Telling him that he'd found where Brigham Newson was.

Telling him that he had Emily.

* * *

He'd never driven so fast in his life. Dave was clinging to the handle on the roof as though it could make the other two wheels touch the ground as they rounded another corner.

It didn't matter.

She was still gone.

They had cleared the ground floor together. She had gone up the stairs alone.

They hadn't known there was a subfloor. A crawlspace in the kitchen just big enough for a man.

He had seen them enter, had heard them looking for him.

Had realized that they didn't know about the trapdoor.

Had listened as she climbed the stairs.

Had waited until Reid's back was turned.

Had struck, and watched the lanky man fall to the ground, unconscious.

Had then, apparently, gone upstairs.

They don't know what he did next.

But there, on the floor in the middle of the second bedroom on the left-hand side, was her gun.

Around its grip was a white daisy, the tips of its petals stained with sticky blood.

* * *

She was cold. Very cold. And she had a distinct feeling of dread in the pit of her stomach. How did she end up here? Where _was_ here? And where was Reid?

She began to take stock of her body.

Her head was pounding, and she felt a trickle of warm blood trace a path down her clammy skin. Her arms were aching from being stretched above her head, secured to the beam with the pair of rusty shackles she could feel tight against the skin of her wrists.

She made it as far as her throbbing ribs before she heard a door slam.

Her eyes popped open as though they had been commanded to do so.

She felt her heart beat faster with every step that she heard.

Her captor was coming to her.

She thought she might be sick.

The old wooden door groaned loudly in protest as it was pushed open, and she got her first glimpse of the man who had brought them all to this God-forsaken town in the first place.

He looked like pure evil.

His shaggy, unkempt hair brushed his shoulders, the greasy strands seeming to mock her as they swung freely. His clothing was torn, his skin was dirty. Flies circled him, but he seemed not to notice.

His focus was locked solely on her.

He took slow steps closer to her, and she caught a whiff of him.

He smelled like death.

She couldn't hold in the shudder that racked her body, and goosebumps that had nothing to do with the cold popped up on her skin.

"Hello, poppet."

By now, he was standing so close she could see her own reflection in the darkness of his eyes.

"Pretty thing, aren't you. Let's have a bit of fun, shall we?"

He pulled a knife from his waistband and stroked it almost lovingly down her chest before bringing it up to rest against her check.

"Go to hell!"

He flashed his yellowed, rotting teeth at her. A string of spittle stretched with his grin and then broke, leaving a trail of wetness down his chin, and she noted with horror that what was left of his teeth had been sharpened into points.

He let his eyes roam her body as he pressed the broad side of the knife harder against her skin, and she couldn't help but shudder. His grin stretched even wider.

"Oh, darling. Don't you know? Hell is empty, and all of the devils are here."


	5. Enter, Devil

Enter, Devil

He turned the blade into her flesh, the skin of her cheek opening up to his piercing gaze and the crimson blood that had once been hers running down the length of the knife, caressing his fingers before dripping onto the floor at her feet. She dared not make a sound, didn't even breathe, just stared ahead at the cinderblock wall with a mask of indifference. It was a test of wills, and she was putting up a hell of a fight.

"I've been watching you."

His sing-song voice sent chills running up her spine.

A slow slice to the other side of her face, the twin cuts sending blood like tears running down her cheeks, still she was silent.

"And I know how _strong_ poppet is."

He slashed the blade down her chest, cutting open fabric and skin in the same stroke, and she couldn't hold in the scream that tore from her throat. He pressed his face into the juncture of her neck and breathed her in, exhaling long and slow with a groan.

Pulling back just slightly, he flashed his sharpened teeth at her.

"Not so strong now, are you?"

His laugh echoed off of the cracked concrete and bounced back to her in surround sound.

* * *

In the five hours since she had gone missing, Hotch had all but torn the case apart. Garcia had poured over every record she could get her hands on with the name Brigham Newson attached to it, the boys had gone over everything they had with a fine-toothed comb for the umpteenth time, Rossi had spoken to every LEO this side of the county line, but thus far they had all been unsuccessful in finding their missing agent.

It was as though he had, yet again, just disappeared.

And that was unacceptable.

He turned back to the phone sitting in the middle of the conference room table.

"Garcia!"

"Yes, sir."

"Look again."

"Sir, there's nothing else to find!"

"Look again! He's taken her somewhere, he has a vehicle, a location. FIND THEM!"

"Sir –"

"NOW!"

The vein on his temple was throbbing in time with the ache in his head and the roiling in his gut. Rossi's hand at his back pulled him back to his responsibilities but did nothing to calm his storm.

"WHAT!"

"The CSIs were finishing up at the house. This was left on the front porch."

He held up a DVD, trepidation written clearly across his face. Hotch's hand shook as he reached for the disc, and the entire room was still, waiting for what would happen next.

"Do we know how long it was there."

Rossi nodded.

"No more than a minute and a half. He rang the doorbell."

"Did anyone see anything?"

He shook his head.

"They were all inside, either in the kitchen or up in the bedroom. By the time anyone got to the door, he was gone."

Hotch slowly nodded, not really expecting anything different.

"Has anyone watched it?"

"No. The techs dusted it for prints, but otherwise it's been untouched."

"WHAT? WHAT'S BEEN UNTOUCHED? SOMEBODY ANSWER ME!"

He startled, having forgotten that the other members of his team were present. Moving back to the speakerphone, he spoke gravely.

"A DVD, Penelope. He taped her for us."

* * *

She hung limply from her chains, unable to summon the strength to raise herself any higher. The long gashes on her chest and abdomen glistened with blood and spit from where his tongue had probed her, sweat ran down her body, stinging her wounds, and the bite mark on the top of her right breast oozed fresh blood with every breath she took.

But the worst wasn't over yet. Because she had seen the dark spot appear on his pants when she had screamed at a particularly painful slice that stretched from hip to hip, had known even before being brought here what he was, what he had done to the others.

And he had promised to be back.

That was, by her estimation, nearly half an hour ago, now.

She shuddered at the thought of what he would do upon his return, the chains holding her up slapping against the old wooden beam they were attached to, sending a sound like chimes circling around the room.

Images of the worst things she had seen, the most heinous acts that had been committed against her fellow man, swirled behind her eyes. She knew that all of them would pale in comparison to what was coming.

She shook herself out of those thoughts, not wanting to dwell on something she could do nothing about. She focused instead on what she hoped would be her ticket out of this hellhole.

The profile.

And somewhere between pulling together his narcissistic tendencies and his blatant sexual sadism, she heard it.

Her breath quickened even as time seemed to slow down, each step that she could hear coming toward her seemed to echo, taunting her.

The lock turned in the door and the breath stilled in her lungs.

The hinges creaked and her heart raced.

The devil entered, and she stood, hellfire in her eyes.

* * *

Reid hardly made it five minutes in to the video before he had to excuse himself, the hateful words accompanying the almost loving caress of the knife proving to be too much for the young genius.

Morgan left with the first scream that the unsub tore from her lips, and Hotch could hear the heart-wrenching sobs coming from the once-bubbly tech on the other end of the conference phone. He watched through the window as Morgan stood with one arm around Reid and the other holding his cellphone up to his ear, a moment later the soft sounds of Garcia speaking to perhaps the only member of his team that would be able to calm her at all right now flittered over the speaker.

Rossi, well, he made it longer than the boys, but when the blade was turned from her flesh to her trousers, he had to look away. He was unable to both bear witness to and hear the torment of her torture, so he buried his face in his hands and allowed his imagination to fill in the gaps between her cries. Occasionally, a tear dripped off the end of his nose and splattered on the coffee-stained industrial carpet, but otherwise the older man sat as a silent statue.

So he was left to witness her anguish alone, to watch as the stained blade slid along the grand canyons already crisscrossing her body, causing them to bleed anew, alone.

To watch as she was stripped bare and made the victim of the oldest crime against women, the knife carving into her thighs with the sole purpose of drawing agony from her lips as he was thrusting into her unwilling body.

Scarlet lines blossomed like flowers on her tender flesh, each one tallied in his mind to be remembered for the rest of his life.

As her broken and bloodied body was discarded on the dirty floor, her unconscious form slumping at the feet of her captor, he wanted to weep.

The beating that followed made red rage flash before his eyes.

With each strike of a fist that hit its mark, his gut lurched.

With each _thwump_ of a boot that connected with her, he felt its twin.

And when the hour-long horror movie finally reached its end, he was left staring at a frozen image of his agent, his friend, beaten into unconsciousness at the hands of a monster the likes of which he wished never to encounter again.

His mind replayed what he had just seen.

The anguish.

The torment.

The agony.

He tallied again the crimes committed against her. One mark for every split in her flesh, every bruise that marred the porcelain of her skin, each broken bone, each touch of his tongue to her battered body.

Each thrust of his hips.

His red rage burned white hot now, and he swore to himself that he'd repay every tally twice over.

He reached to turn the DVD off, not wanting to have to view his failure on a screen in addition to the technicolor 3-D that was running on a loop in his mind, then turned back to the speaker still sitting in the middle of the table.

"Garcia."

"Yes, sir?"

"I'm sending the jet to get you."


	6. Hell's Territory

Hell's Territory

By the time Morgan had returned with Garcia, Hotch had watched that damn tape enough times to memorize it. He knew every word that was spoken, every whimper, every gasp, every hit, every cut, every little thing that happened. He was convinced that there was something hidden in the video that would help them, they just needed to find it.

"Hotch, man, we've been at this for hours. There's nothing here."

His dark eyes flashed dangerously at Morgan, daring him to repeat himself.

"We need a break."

"We need a lot of things, Morgan. Not the least of which is a lead."

His dismissive tone left no further argument, but that didn't stop Morgan from trying.

"C'mon, Hotch. We need to sleep."

"Take twenty. We'll shift it."

"But – "

"No, Morgan! Nobody's leaving here! Sleep or don't sleep, I don't give a rat's ass. But you stay in this station."

The younger man, thoroughly chastised by his tone, nodded his head and tipped his head back down to the transcript of the tape, hoping that they would find something, anything, soon, if for no other reason than because with every passing minute, the fuse to his boss's temper was becoming exponentially shorter.

Hotch turned back to the tape, starting it again and praying that this time, maybe this time, _please, God, this time_ , something would jump out at him, he'd find something to find _her_.

He hoped there was still a _her_ to find.

* * *

With each careful run of the blade along barely healed flesh, she had to remind herself to hold back.

He cut open the angry line running down her forearm.

 _Remember the profile_.

He slashed at the still oozing canyon on her abdomen.

 _He wants you to break_.

He sliced open the wound on her thigh.

 _You can't give him what he wants_.

With each pass of the bloodied knife, old wounds were reopened, the sharpened edge tore just a little bit further into her.

He certainly knew what he was doing, inflicting maximum pain and minimum damage. The darkness of unconsciousness would not soon take her into its arms, she would not feel mercy's caress.

Anger coursed through her, pulsing in time with the steady streaks of the blade and causing her whole body to shake.

It did not go unnoticed, though was misinterpreted as fear.

A grin stretched across his lips as he leaned in close to her again, running his tongue along the shell of her ear and whispering to her.

"Come, now, poppet. Be brave now."

Her temper flared, and she gritted her teeth. Before she could stop herself, she swung her head forward with as much force as she could muster, hearing a satisfying crunch as she connected with his face. Blood spurted from his nose as his hands came up to cup the throbbing area, and he howled in pain. He glared at her, the fury in his eyes matching that in her own.

"You bitch! I was being nice to you!"

He grabbed her face in his bloody hand, squeezing so hard she truly thought her bones were going to crack under the pressure.

"You're going to wish you hadn't done that, poppet."

She didn't have time to brace herself before his closed fist connected with her face and her world exploded in fresh pain.

* * *

"Sir! I think I found it!"

The room stilled as all eyes turned to the colorful redhead on whom they were pinning all of their hopes.

"You think?"

"Well, I'm not a sound technician, but listen to this."

The five agents shuffled closer to her and she played the tape through the speakers.

The sounds of torment and torture filled the room, and the men visibly flinched.

"Babygirl – "

"No, listen!"

She adjusted the frequencies and Emily's whimpers and cries faded into the background and were replaced by the faintest sounds of music.

"Is that – "

Garcia turned to face them.

"It sure sounds like the Red Hot Chili Peppers to me."

The chorus of Under the Bridge filtered unmistakably through the speakers, and Hotch could've cried.

"That's not just music. That's a marching band. There's a school nearby."

"There's a band competition coming up, all of the schools in the county compete."

All eyes turned to the deputy who had spoken, willing him to continue.

"My boy's on the drumline at Glacier. All of the schools pick a theme, he's doing the Lion King."

The agents shared a look, and Morgan turned back to the deputy.

"Do you know what the other themes are?"

The deputy shook his head.

"No, but I can find out."

Morgan looked back to Garcia.

"Babygirl, I need – "

"A list of contact numbers for the music departments at all of the county's high schools. It's already hurtling over the airways to your PDA."

He graced her with a small smile.

"Alright, deputy. Let's start making calls."

* * *

"Littlefork!"

The door to the conference room slammed against the wall, causing the glass in the windows to quiver. All eyes moved to Morgan, who was standing in the doorway with a triumphant look on his face.

"Littlefork Senior High's band is putting on a rock concert."

For the first time since arriving in Montana, the coil in Hotch's gut loosened ever so slightly and he felt like he could breathe a little easier.

"Garcia…"

"Four steps ahead, mon Capitan."

Five simultaneous cell phones buzzing alerted the team of the address of the school, and they immediately stood to prepare themselves to leave.

"Now, go get my gumdrop."

* * *

Forty minutes later the caravan of black SUVs and police cars pulled to a stop on the service road that ran between the high school and the woods behind it. The group surrounded Reid, who had spread a map over the hood of the vehicle.

"How big of an area are we looking at, Reid."

"Based on the sound amplification system that was in use at the time, relative air temperature and humidity, and the dense foliage of the surrounding area, I would estimate maybe 5-10 miles. However – "

Hotch looked at the darkening sky and felt his impatience get the best of him.

"Reid!"

"She should be within a 10-mile radius, but she'd definitely be within 15."

"Ok. We'll grid search in teams. I want contact every twenty minutes. Morgan, you take the far north. Rossi, the east. I'll head west. Reid, coordinate from here. Remember, he's armed and dangerous, and by now he'll have tired of normal torture."

Speaking the words shot a lightning bolt of fear through his body.

"We're not leaving without her."

* * *

Night had fully embraced them by the time they had covered half of the area that Reid had outlined.

Hotch was furious.

His team had found nothing, and he knew that Morgan and Rossi weren't having any more luck than he was.

What's more, the deputies were getting antsy, none of them particularly happy to be traipsing through the woods after a sadistic serial killer in unfamiliar woods in the dark.

Not that he really blamed them.

He wasn't particularly happy to be there either.

He'd meant it, though, when he'd told them he wasn't leaving without her.

She'd already been gone for far too long.

But still, the deputies were losing steam, so maybe a coffee break was in order. Just as the words were forming on his tongue, a shout came from his right.

"Agent!"

He turned to look where the man was pointing. Swinging his mag light and squinting his eyes, he could just make out the shadow of a structure about fifty yards away. He radioed in to the other teams before leading his group to have a closer look.

The glass of the windows was coated in filth and cracked in some places, the old wooden siding was peeling away from the cabin, and the boards of the porch had rotted and fallen away leaving only a few to act as stepping stones from the steps to the solitary door. From what he could see, the dilapidated building had been unoccupied for weeks. He motioned for the deputies to join him before breaching the door. In no time at all they had cleared the structure, finding only dust and mice.

"False alarm." He called over his headset.

"Nobody's been here for a long time."

His disappointment was palpable as he led the deputies out of the cabin and back into the freezing night air.

"Hotch, I'm about a quarter mile to your north. We've got something over here."

"We're headed your way, Morgan."

* * *

After as many years as he's been doing this job, and what he'd seen over the past few days, he'd thought he'd stopped being surprised by this world's horrors long ago. But his time in SWAT and the Bureau had done little to prepare him for what was on the other side of the walls of the sprawling house nestled back in the woods.

The smell hit him like a brick wall at 20 yards. Only his iron-clad self-control prevented him from losing the little sustenance he'd managed to consume that day.

A few of the deputies weren't as lucky. He left them outside to make a perimeter.

As Morgan finessed the lock, all three of the seasoned agents were struck by the abject horror contained therein.

Blood had painted the walls red and the room was illuminated by a series of lamps whose shades were, judging by the tattoos adorning them, made of human skin. The rug on the floor was woven from hair of all shades, and dismembered body parts were everywhere. The bulletin board hung on the wall was covered in photos of their unsub's victims; some Hotch recognized, most he didn't. All of them tortured, their agony plain to see on their faces even after a death that they, in all likelihood, had prayed for.

And if the eyeful he'd had already hadn't convinced him that this was indeed the home of their unsub, the blood-stained white daisies pinned to the pictures would've.

Realizing he'd been standing in the doorway for too long, he moved to clear the rest of the floor with Morgan. As they headed into the kitchen, a noise sounded from below. They moved into the hallway with their weapons drawn, both hoping that they hadn't alerted their disturbed unsub to their presence, as surprise was currently their best weapon. They moved further into the dark corridor and found a plain-looking wooden door. Easing it open, they found a staircase leading to a lower level, the steps half-rotted in the cold, damp of the basement.

He shared a look with Morgan before leading them down the stairs. The basement, unlike the upstairs, had no light. They paused a moment to let their eyes adjust, not wanting to risk the light being seen by their unsub. He spied an old, heavy wooden door with metal chains around the handle down a short hallway and pointed it out to his agent. Hotch felt apprehension coil tightly in his gut, and he found his legs shaking ever so slightly as he commanded them forward. In the half-light they crept along, following the scuffles and whimpers that sounded occasionally, each of them tearing at the agents' hearts.

The sounds intensified the farther down the hallway they moved. Looking quickly at Morgan, he could see the fear he felt reflected in the other man's eyes. As he prepared to open the door, he wondered what fresh hell was waiting for them up ahead, hidden in the dark.

Then, a scream.

* * *

He had grown tired of beating her bloody and slicing her open when the sounds of torment the knife pulled from her lips met his ears with less vigor. He had moved on, then, to other, more _interesting_ methods of drawing her suffering out in whimpers and gasps. The burns littering her arms and torso were blistering, some still smoking from the ash left behind when the butt of the cigarette that had raised them had been pulled away from her flesh, and the solitary drops of acid running down the lengths of her legs left trails of white-hot agony behind them. He took the wires running from the generator and connected them to her left breast, causing her muscles to contract painfully and her vision to swim in front of her eyes. She clenched her jaw, refusing to so easily give him what he wanted. Anger flashed across his face, and he moved the wires to her right breast to give it the same treatment. As the current ran through her body once more, her mind focused on a noise in the background.

Faintly, so quietly that she could hardly be sure she had heard it, boots were tromping. She flashed her eyes to Brigham's, but he seemed not to have noticed the echoes of the floorboards above them, so focused was he on the infliction of her pain.

Her mind was whirring with the possibilities of those boots. Was it her team? Was it _his_ team? Oh, God, did he have a partner? Jesus, what was she going to do if he did? And if it _was_ her team, did they know she was here? Should she call out to them?

She was pulled from her thoughts with a slap to the face. He had noticed her withdrawn state, and it had enraged him. Squeezing her jaw tightly in his hand, he forced her to look at him.

"Ah, poppet. Focus now."

He increased the power of the generator, his hard eyes locking onto her defiant ones as he slowly moved the wires closer to her body. She couldn't help but tremble in anticipation.

When the wires finally made contact, every muscle in her body went rigid. Her back arched painfully, and she couldn't move her lungs to breathe. Just when she was about to pass into blissful unconsciousness, he pulled back.

She had barely regained her breath when he touched them to her again, this time, too, letting the electricity ravage her body just to the brink of unconsciousness before pulling her back into the torturous present.

He moved to repeat the cycle a third time, and she wore her fear freely on her face, no longer having the strength to wear her brave mask. By the time he pulled back, she was unable to focus on anything but the agony coursing through her, and all thoughts of her team had disappeared from her mind.

Her throat was raw from all of the screams that had been already been torn from it, but that did nothing to stop the whimper that was pulled from her lips as the electricity burned through her for the fourth time.

She was so dehydrated her tongue felt like sandpaper in her mouth, but that did nothing to stem the tears that flowed freely down her face as her muscles contorted into an unnatural position.

Brigham gently kissed the salty drops away as the last waves of electricity rolled through her body, igniting her nerve endings so that her world exploded in pain like the night sky on the fourth of July.

When she was once again in control of her body, she gasped for the air that had been stolen from her lungs.

"God!"

The plea fell unexpectedly from her unwilling lips. His sharpened teeth, the tips now tinged red with her blood, flashed at her in a sickening smile.

"Oh, poppet." He ran his tongue over the twin marks the wires had left, causing fresh waves of pain to course through her. He moved to one of the cuts on her arm that had not yet clotted and collected some of her oozing blood on the tip of his tongue, running it over his lips and staining them a revolting red.

"This is hell's territory. I am beholden to no gods."

The corners of his mouth turned up into a sickeningly sweet smile before his teeth dug into the skin at her collarbone, tearing the tender flesh away.

She screamed.


	7. Face God

Face God

It was as though he had forgotten that Morgan was there, he burst into the room so quickly. His eyes were hard, his face set in sharp planes of anger. His gaze didn't stray from the filthy man in front of him, the grime he could see on him nothing compared to the stains of inhumanity that Hotch knew covered his soul. His hands didn't shake, his feet didn't stumble, and when he called out to him, his voice was as clear as if he was ordering lunch.

Inside though, he felt tears welling in eyes that begged not to see the woman he cared for hanging from rusted chains, and he fought hard to keep his anguish from his face. Inside, his whole body trembled in fear and rage, his whole attention focused on staying upright and not shooting his own foot off. Inside, his voice mewled like a newborn kitten, the runt of the litter, begging for mercy for _her_.

"Brigham Newson!"

Hotch watched as the unsub's eyes darted from the gun locked dead center on his form to the agent holding it, saw the rage barely contained there when he realized he was trapped.

Saw the hand with the knife, that bloody knife that had been the reason for some of those bone-shaking screams that will haunt him for the rest of his days, twitch.

Time stopped.

The rest came in flashes, snapshots of action that appeared in front of him as though he was watching secondhand, as though he wasn't really there.

His body, frozen.

His mind, sluggish.

His eyes locked on hers, feeling irrationally as though he would be signing her death warrant if he looked away from her now.

His hands, always steady, faltered in the lapse of his attention – his weapon fell away from its target.

The unsub, like the wild animal he appeared as, saw his only opportunity to escape and took it, charging at Hotch with that same bloody knife, and he thought it rather fitting as he watched death come to him that his agony would be ended by the same instrument that brought so much of it in recent days.

He stood a statue as the devil incarnate came to him in slow motion, face curled in a sneer halfway between hatred and twisted excitement, and still he was unable to pull his eyes from her.

Her face was dirty and painted in blood. Dark bruises had blossomed under the porcelain of her skin, forming her into a patchwork of past and present torment, the only clean parts the twin trails that tracked down the planes of her face, standing like towers, a testament to her torture.

Of all that he could see, every mark on her body, those were what ate at him most.

That monster had made her cry.

His brain processed Newson taking another two steps closer to him, and he moved his focus from her face, taking in the bare expanse of her skin, flayed open and painted the same splotches of blood red and painful purple. The burns that were raised and littered across her body – even the blind could know the extent of her suffering.

He was almost within arm's reach now – could almost feel the breeze of the blade swinging at him.

Wondered if he should feel something.

Felt empty instead.

Empty and still, gaze locked, weapon dropped, ready to pay for the crimes he committed.

His only transgression his failure to protect her.

Her.

Her, whose eyes were watching him now, clear and determined.

Her, whose hands didn't tremble in their place suspended over her head.

Her, whose every non-verbal cue was desperately begging him to save himself.

To save her.

He couldn't fail her now.

Newfound strength flooded him, reignited by the anger he felt at the man in front of him who had seemingly so easily managed to take control, to work Hotch to his advantage.

His grip tightened around his Glock and he made to raise it.

Before he could, a pain in his chest.

Suddenly, he was falling to the floor.

* * *

As though wishing could make it so, she asked for Hotch and the universe had delivered him to her, busting through the old, heavy door like it wasn't even there, his weapon drawn and steady on her tormentor.

It was about time something went her way in this hell hole.

His shouted "Brigham Newson" was music to her ears and a balm to her battered soul, bringing relief like a flood washing over her.

She felt more than saw the unsub's gaze move from gun to man, knew the moment he realized he had no way out from the tension that coiled tightly in his body, the growl that escaped passed his lips even now, in the face of her salvation, sending cold shivers down her spine.

She felt the hand with the knife tighten and knew instantly that his fight-or-flight instinct had activated, and he was not running away.

Relief left her as quickly as it had come, and she desperately tried to catch Hotch's eye, hoping to warn him before he found himself adding to the blood-stained concrete.

Suddenly she found herself staring into two deep pools of midnight black.

What she found looking back at her made her gasp.

Dark despair was sitting not-so-hidden in his depths, pain and torment showed freely and made her question just who had been tortured in this basement.

His hands shook, only ever so slightly, so small that you had to be looking for it.

But she was a profiler.

One of the six best in the world (because even if Gideon had left their work, he still did it damn well).

And she was always looking.

And her looking eyes saw also when his weapon, held before so firmly, now faltered and fell away from its target.

She wasn't the only one who noticed this time.

His eyes stayed locked on hers as Newson made his move, long legs making short work of the small distance between them.

Neither agent moved.

Neither breathed.

Neither blinked.

* * *

He would have to remember to thank Morgan later.

And apologize.

For now, though, his attention was fixed on another of his team.

Morgan wrestled the knife out of Newson's hand and pulled him from where he had tackled the both of them to the ground. He heard faintly the sounds of Morgan roughly cuffing and patting down their now-contained unsub over the deafening sounds of his own breath as it crashed like the coarse waves of a stormy sea in his head.

His body seemed to move on its own toward her – he had no memory of commanding his legs to stand, his feet to walk. He picked up the key from where Morgan had slid it along the ground to him, its weight heavier for what it implied.

His arms reached for her, the barest of touches traced up her arms to where they were secured to the beam.

The turn of the key unlocked her wrists and set free the last vestiges of her strength. She fell against him, trembling from both cold and exhaustion, fear that still had a grip on her and relief that had not yet fully enveloped her.

"Emily."

His arms encircled her, a wall between her and the rest of the world. He felt the chill in her bones and shrugged out of his jacket, his vest, his dress shirt. He managed to pull his undershirt over her head without having to step away, and redressed himself without ever fully letting go of her.

Morgan came to them, then. He must've handed Newson off to one of the deputies, traded him for the pair of sweatpants gripped in his hand.

Hotch took them from him and looked to Emily for permission before gently helping her step into the legs and pulling the soft cloth to rest on her hips, tying the drawstring so they were more secure in their place.

Her trembling grew worse, and he could see the full magnitude of what had happened was only just hitting her.

It was starting to hit him, too.

He drew her back into his embrace, taking a moment to breathe her in before they had to face the circus outside.

The heartbeat in her chest, the breath in her lungs, the warmth of her skin, the weight of her swirled around him in a proclamation of undeniable life, and he relaxed for the first time since they had arrived in Montana.

He felt her gather herself, and when she pulled away, there was no longer a scared woman looking back at him, but a capable agent.

His agent.

* * *

Rossi must have radioed Reid because the faintest traces of the first rise of the sun were lost amid the red and blue splashes of light that splattered harshly across the trees, and any silence the woods once held was shattered by the deputies that now flooded it.

A herd of people paraded out of the front door, bringing with them boxes and bags, photographs of the horror that had happened there.

A lamp of skin.

A rug of hair.

The man responsible came with the next wave, the front porch creaking under the weight of the twenty deputies that were accompanying him.

Hotch wasn't taking any chances this time.

Reid and Rossi fought against the river of evidence collectors to join their worse-for-wear counterparts in that god-forsaken basement. Together, the four men formed a protective wall around her, their heart.

Morgan, ahead of her. Blazing a trail and leading the way.

Rossi, behind. Making sure all of his ducklings come wandering back from their scattered places over the hills and far away.

Reid to the right, the little brother she could lean on, the one who would keep her secrets.

Hotch to the left, brushing her hand with every step, though if that was for her benefit or his she still wasn't sure. The warmth from his form seeped into her core, lifting some of the weight from her shoulders. They reached the front door and slipped back into their agent facades, filing out the opening and into the lightening day just in time to see Brigham Newson being shoved into the rear of a squad car by a deputy.

An especially gruesome artifact of torture was withdrawn from the house, one of the rookies in its path bearing witness, perhaps for the first time in his life, to the true evil that lies in the depths of the human mind.

The rookie, now tinged a sickly green, lost his lunch into the trees, a sight not unseen by the sheriff standing by the open door of the squad car that now held prisoner the monster that had done all of this.

"God help us all."

From the backseat, a gut-churning laugh.

"I will face your God and walk backwards into Hell."


End file.
